Flexible access to patient data through e-consent

Abstract

The advances in healthcare and information technology are shifting more and more the ownership of data from medi-cal institutions and doctors to individual citizens. However, since the medical information of an individual is confiden-tial, the only basis for sharing it, is through prior informed consent which will regulate access to his private healthcare data. This paper highlights challenges investigated in three EU research projects and presents a solution utilizing novel access control mechanisms to ensure the selective exposure of the patients' sensitive information thereby empowering them. Our solution can efficiently support the entire life-cycle of consent such as withdrawal, activation, deletion or update. Moreover it responds to complex and different sce-narios in which the patient can deffine complicated and dy-namic access control policies at different granularity levels. In this paper we propose a Personal Health Record (PHR) system, accessible through desktop and mobile devices, that explores the efficient access regulation to information ac-cording to the consent forms provided by the patients.